Hootsuite Social Media Management » Matt Foulgerhttp://blog.hootsuite.com
Engage, Monitor, Collaborate and Analyze, SecurelyTue, 31 Mar 2015 21:27:05 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1.1Bring the Power of Real Time Chat to Twitter with the SnapEngage app for Hootsuitehttp://blog.hootsuite.com/real-time-chat-twitter-snapengage-app-for-hootsuite/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/real-time-chat-twitter-snapengage-app-for-hootsuite/#commentsWed, 11 Feb 2015 11:00:33 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=68554SnapEngage, the popular live chat application, is now available in Hootsuite. The SnapEngage integration enables joint customers to easily invite Twitter users into private real time chats, so... Read More

]]>SnapEngage, the popular live chat application, is now available in Hootsuite. The SnapEngage integration enables joint customers to easily invite Twitter users into private real time chats, so your chat team can quickly resolve customer support issues before they escalate. Decrease your email ticket volume, help customers faster, and increase your sales conversion rate by connecting directly with prospects at critical moments.

With the SnapEngage app for Hootsuite, now available in the App Directory, you can enhance your Twitter strategy with the privacy, convenience, and speed of real time chat to create an exceptional customer experience.

How Hootsuite’s Support Team uses SnapEngage to Boost Customer Satisfaction

Hootsuite’s customer support activity has grown exponentially since our humble beginnings in 2009. With groups in Vancouver, London, and Bucharest, our support team now works around the clock to help customers on social media, delivering about 1500 Tweets per week from our main support handle, @Hootsuite_Help. “Almost all of our Twitter responses to direct mentions clock in under 10-15 minutes,” says Teri Bayrock, Hootsuite’s Channel Operations Manager. In addition to monitoring official mentions, Teri’s team also listens for support-related keywords that allow them to reach out to customers proactively.

Using Hootsuite Assignments, the globally distributed team can collaborate to resolve most customer support issues on the social channels where they originate. However, not every conversation is best suited for social media. “Transparency is a core value for our support team,” says Teri, “but so is the security of our customers’ private information.” Before using SnapEngage, the Hootsuite customer support team brought 200-300 conversations from Twitter into email each week. Email allowed the team to communicate privately and without a 140-character limit on every message, but it forced customers to go too far out of their way to get support.

Since adopting SnapEngage, 80% of the issues that would have previously been sent to email have been resolved within chat, creating a better experience for Hootsuite customers and our support team, as well. “As chat volume increases, helpdesk ticket volume decreases and our overall customer satisfaction increases,” says Teri.

The SnapEngage app for Hootsuite allows support associates to easily send out chat invitations to customers on Twitter, who can now initiate private real time chats with a single click. After integrating chat into our support process, overall customer satisfaction is at an all-time high.

]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/real-time-chat-twitter-snapengage-app-for-hootsuite/feed/0image01Expand Customer Service with the WebsiteAlive App for Hootsuitehttp://blog.hootsuite.com/expand-customer-service-with-the-websitealive-app-for-hootsuite/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/expand-customer-service-with-the-websitealive-app-for-hootsuite/#commentsTue, 03 Feb 2015 13:00:11 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=68327More and more people are using social media to connect with brands, but not every customer support issue or sales opportunity can be resolved in public with 140-character... Read More

]]>More and more people are using social media to connect with brands, but not every customer support issue or sales opportunity can be resolved in public with 140-character messages. With the WebsiteAlive app for Hootsuite, available now in the App Directory, your organization can easily invite customers from social media into private real-time chats with support or sales teams.

Whether you’re looking to speed up customer service or convert more sales from social, the integration of WebsiteAlive and Hootsuite empowers your business to bridge the divisions between social media, your website, and online chat to create a seamless customer experience.

Integrate social media with live chat

The WebsiteAlive app for Hootsuite allows social media managers and other Hootsuite users to easily hand off customers from social media into instant one-on-one conversations with WebsiteAlive chat operators.

“We’re seeing more and more demand from customers who are heavy users of social media, but who want to supplement that immediacy with a private, secure channel of communication,” says WebsiteAlive chief technical officer Dustin Yu.

Key integration benefits:

Provide better customer service with 1-on-1 private chats with customers from social media streams

Easily send links to start a chat on any social network such as Twitter and Facebook to engage followers in real time

Collaborate with your WebsiteAlive chat team from within the Hootsuite dashboard to make a seamless customer hand-off

Delight your customers with fast, proactive service

The integration of WebsiteAlive into the Hootsuite ecosystem makes it incredibly easy for your organization to take a proactive approach to social customer service. Using Hootsuite, you can rapidly identify and engage with customers who need assistance on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks. When you want to invite someone to a private chat, simply select “Send Alivechat link” from the dropdown menu on one of their social messages.

Once the customer clicks on a chat link, they launch a secure chat instance that is not saved on any social network. The chat window connects them directly with a member of your WebsiteAlive chat team, so they can quickly resolve the issue or complete the sale with a meaningful, one-to-one conversation.

Collaborate with your chat team

There’s a seamless transition for your organization behind the scenes as well. The app enables Hootsuite users to communicate directly with a WebsiteAlive chat team through a stream in the Hootsuite dashboard, so chat operators get all of the context and information they need to continue an existing conversation from social media.

“A big focus for us is enabling our customers to engage with their clients on social in the best, most efficient way possible,” says Kevin Zellmer, global director of enterprise business development. “We’re really excited about this integration with WebsiteAlive and how it will enable a seamless customer service experience, from identifying the social messages with requests for help, to instantly bringing the conversation to WebsiteAlive—all within the Hootsuite dashboard.”

Drive ecommerce revenue

Potential buyers are already on social media at every stage of their decision making process, engaging in highly influential conversations about your brand, your products, and your competitors. However, social media remains largely untapped as a direct source of e-commerce revenue.

The WebsiteAlive app for Hootsuite empowers sales agents to engage people at the right time, in the right channel, with the right offer. When social media users respond to one of your campaigns, contests, or promotions, you can immediately invite them to a secure chat with a sales agent who can answer their questions in real time and close the sale. The one-click connection between social media and chat means your business can activate customers right away and rapidly convert engagement into revenue.

For example, sports teams can use the app to drive more ticket sales from social channels. They can identify social media users who respond to exclusive promotions or ask about ticket availability, and then reach out with a chat invitation to connect them directly with a ticket agent.

]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/expand-customer-service-with-the-websitealive-app-for-hootsuite/feed/0Expand Customer Service with the WebsiteAlive App for HootsuiteImprove your social customer service with shorter response times and personalized offers, made possible by WebsiteAlive app for Hootsuitesocial customer service,WebsiteAlive,WebsiteAliveHow to Spot Trends On Instagram—Before It’s Too Latehttp://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-spot-trends-on-instagram-trendspottr-for-instagram-hootsuite-app/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-spot-trends-on-instagram-trendspottr-for-instagram-hootsuite-app/#commentsTue, 13 Jan 2015 13:00:07 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=67819With more than 300 million active users, Instagram has become an indispensable network for brands, agencies, and newsrooms. But with more than 70 million photos and videos being... Read More

]]>With more than 300 million active users, Instagram has become an indispensable network for brands, agencies, and newsrooms. But with more than 70 million photos and videos being shared every day, it’s increasingly difficult to pick out the most timely and relevant content.

Instagram’s search function is still a work in progress, and its “Explore tab” only surfaces content based on what you’ve liked in the past. What if you don’t know which hashtag or user to search for? And can you tell which content and trends are about to go viral?

Hootsuite has teamed up with TrendSpottr to create a better way to find the people and posts that matter. The TrendSpottr for Instagram app for Hootsuite is a powerful new tool for social media marketers and Instagram power users who want to gain timely insights into emerging Instagram trends and influencers.

Find top trending photos and videos for any tag or keyword

Discover what’s trending about your brand, campaign, or any topic of interest

Rapidly Discover Trending Photos and Videos

Whether you’re looking for engaging posts to re-share with your community, or monitoring breaking news and emerging trends, the TrendSpottr for Instagram app allows you to save time and find the hottest content with every search. The app delivers far more useful search results than the standard Instagram search, which simply returns posts with the most recent activity. Instead, Trendspottr for Instagram surfaces the most relevant and trending content that is predicted to have the highest engagement and virality.

The app integration allows you to save time and work more efficiently by monitoring Instagram campaigns from the convenience of your Hootsuite dashboard. You can set up multiple Trendspottr for Instagram search streams in Hootsuite to continuously monitor every hashtag and trend that matters to you, side-by-side with other social networks and apps. And with just a few clicks, you can share trending Instagram content directly to your social networks through the Hootsuite publisher.

Boost Your Reach By Finding Related Trending Hashtags

Hashtags are an essential part of the Instagram experience and a highly effective way to increase the exposure of your content. However, adding a string of popular but irrelevant hashtags to an Instagram post is a desperate spamming tactic that won’t even help you reach the right people. To maximize their effectiveness, it’s important to pick hashtags that are not only relevant to your brand but currently in use by your intended audience.

For most social media marketers, choosing hashtags on Instagram is a bit of a guessing game, especially when news stories and trends are developing in real time. With the TrendSpottr for Instagram app, you can discover all of the top trending hashtags that are related to any search query. Stay on top of every trend and find the emerging hashtags that can boost your reach with the right audience, right now.

You can also use the app to survey the landscape of trends that are related and relevant to your own hashtag. This is an easy and effective way to better understand the community you’re building around a given brand, campaign, or shared interest. Simply type your hashtag into the app’s search bar, and then select “Trending Hashtags” from the dropdown in the “Show” menu. You’ll then be able to see all of the top trending hashtags that are closely related to your own hashtag, revealing additional ways to reach, monitor, and engage with your community.

]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/how-to-spot-trends-on-instagram-trendspottr-for-instagram-hootsuite-app/feed/0Trendspottr for Instagram – Trend DiscoveryThe 9 Must-Read Social Media Articles of 2014http://blog.hootsuite.com/best-social-media-articles-2014/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/best-social-media-articles-2014/#commentsFri, 19 Dec 2014 15:00:53 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=67706We’ve all been there. Your co-workers are standing around the water cooler, engaged in an animated conversation. You approach, hoping to chat about the latest episode of the... Read More

]]>We’ve all been there. Your co-workers are standing around the water cooler, engaged in an animated conversation. You approach, hoping to chat about the latest episode of the Serial podcast. Then somebody asks, “Hey Matt, what do you think about Facebook Zero?”

“Umm, it’s delicious?”

Blank stares.

“I can’t believe it doesn’t have any calories? What are we talking about, again?”

Next time, don’t leave yourself out of the loop. Use this handy cheat sheet to catch up on nine of the absolute best social media articles, reports, and essays from 2014. When you get back to the water cooler in 2015, you’ll have something to talk about other than your mother-in-law’s fruitcake.

The most important development for social media marketers in 2014 was undoubtedly the decline of organic reach on Facebook. In February, Social@Ogilvy reported that organic reach for Facebook pages with over 500,000 Likes had dropped to just 2%. The agency argued that businesses were rapidly approaching a watershed moment they called Facebook Zero, the point when organic reach becomes nonexistent.

Marketers have had to reconsider how Facebook fits into the mix of paid, owned, and earned media. When organic reach was high, brands could treat their Facebook pages as “owned” media, but those days are over. Look for 2015 to be the year of paid social media, as brands and publishers increasingly use promoted posts and social ads to reach audiences on Facebook and Twitter.

Jay Baer offers a controversial solution to what he calls the “Reachpocalypse” on Facebook and social media in general. He argues that the decline of organic reach on social media requires marketers to adopt a “shotgun” strategy, which involves sending more messages in more places. His suggested approach emphasizes quantity over quality, which sounds like blasphemy to most social media professionals and content marketers.

But the key to Baer’s strategy is to connect with each fan in as many social channels as possible, rather than building up a massive audience in one place. According to Baer, the most important metric for social media marketers is now the average number of connections per fan. Whether you’re inclined to agree, Baer addresses issues that will be critical to social media strategy in 2015. Facebook might be the first social network to reduce organic reach, but it definitely won’t be the last.

In this piece for the Wall Street Journal, Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes explains why the introduction of “buy” buttons in Twitter and Facebook is just the tip of the iceberg for payment technology in social media. For now, the social networks are still experimenting with ecommerce and finding out how to bring one-click payments into your streams. But what happens if Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks get tired of being the middlemen for the credit card companies and other payment processors? Credit card interchange fees represent a $40 billion industry in the U.S. alone, so it wouldn’t be surprising if the biggest social networking sites start looking for a slice of that pie.

The social payments ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly. Less than two months after Holmes’ article was published, Snapchat announced Snapcash, a partnership with Square that allows its users to send money directly to friends.

Why are fanboys so maniacally loyal to their favorite brands? And what compels them to write hateful, insulting Tweets about their rivals? To find out, Lessley Anderson interviews several fanboys who are on the front lines of the most vicious flamewar of them all: the three-way struggle for smartphone supremacy between Google, Apple, and Microsoft devotees. She discovers that every fanboy is unique, like a precious, angry snowflake. The path from casual fan to obsessive zealot turns out to be a highly personal experience.

However, the article also suggests that most of us have more in common with fanboys than we might readily admit. Whether it’s religion, politics, or a sports team, we use social media to rally around a common interest with like-minded people. It’s easy to get trapped inside an echo chamber, where all conflicting views are filtered out. Anderson’s revealing look at fanboys is a cautionary reminder that social media should broaden your perspective, not close it.

Wired’s Mat Honan puts Facebook’s algorithm—and his sanity—to the test by liking literally everything he sees on Facebook for 48 hours. Every status update, every shared article, and every brand (including Hootsuite, which was nice of him). The results are hilarious, horrifying, and illuminating. “By liking everything,” he writes, “I turned Facebook into a place where there was nothing I liked.”

When it comes to viral media, nobody does it better than Buzzfeed. The site has not only mastered the art of the “listicle”, the overwhelmingly popular article format you’re reading right now, but the powerful psychology of identity and relatedness that inspires people to click (and share) content. In an epic interview with Felix Salmon at Medium, Buzzfeed founder Jonah Peretti shares his thoughts on a broad range of topics, including network theory, experimentation in the media industry, and his experience at the Huffington Post before he moved on to Buzzfeed. It’s a dense, thoughtful, and very long read, which is ironic considering Peretti’s predilection for bite-sized content. However, it’s well worth your time if you’re in the business of sharing.

In this thought-provoking essay, Anil Dash takes issue with publishers and technologists who believe any social media message that is not explicitly private is fair game to share without consent. Dash regrets that “there is no apparent debate over whether it’s any different to embed a tweet from the President of the United States or from a vulnerable young activist who might not have anticipated her words being attached to her real identity, where she can be targeted by anonymous harassers.”

According to Dash, most human behaviour is “neither clearly public nor strictly private”, but something in between. He challenges us to create a more nuanced definition of “public” that better reflects the world we live in. In his view, journalists and bloggers have an ethical obligation to consider the consequences of broadcasting someone’s semi-public words to a massive audience. His essay is a must-read for anyone who has embedded a Tweet in a blog post or article.

In early August, social media in the United States was taken over by two simultaneous sensations: the Ice Bucket Challenge, and the events in Ferguson, Missouri. Yet as John McDermott shows, each story played out very differently on Facebook and Twitter. You may recall that your Facebook feed was practically drowning in ice water at the height of the trend, while nearly everyone in your Twitter feed was embroiled in the Ferguson controversy.

In 2014, Facebook and Twitter became increasingly similar in form (just look at your feeds side by side), but this episode demonstrates that they remain far apart in function. For the time being, Facebook is primarily a place where people like to connect with friends and family, share photos and videos, and relax. Its algorithmically curated News Feed does a great job of surfacing highly engaging content, but can’t match Twitter for real time discussion around breaking news stories. In the year ahead, we may see the two networks converge further, as Facebook tweaks its service to become more of a news provider and Twitter considers using algorithms to curate your timeline. Stay tuned.

Netropolitan, a social network for the 1%, is betting that wealthy individuals can’t wait to socialize online about a common interest: money. It operates like a country club, with an upfront lifetime membership cost of $9,000 plus a recurring annual fee of $3,000. Jules Suzdaltsev of VICE interviewed Netropolitan’s founder, James Touchi-Peters, to find out how the site works, why it exists, and if socialites really need to be any more social. The interview touches on several key issues that every new social network must deal with, including security, privacy, content guidelines, and yes, monetization.

Many specialized networks based on common interests have cropped up over the years, with varying degrees of success. Some are still going strong, such as SERMO, the social network for physicians. Many others haven’t fared so well. A recent example is ReaganBook, a social network for American political conservatives that was shut down shortly after launch. And who can forget HAMSTERster, the now-defunct social network for pet hamsters? It remains to be seen whether Netropolitan’s business model will help it succeed where others have been left spinning their wheels.

Do you have a favorite social media article from 2014? Let us know in the comments!

]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/best-social-media-articles-2014/feed/03 Ways Your Brick-and-Mortar Location Can Use Social Media To Drive Businesshttp://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-to-drive-business-to-store/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-to-drive-business-to-store/#commentsThu, 11 Dec 2014 13:00:20 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=67496Whether you’re a small business owner, a franchisee, or a manager for a retail chain, social media has the potential to drive the bottom line at your brick-and-mortar... Read More

]]>Whether you’re a small business owner, a franchisee, or a manager for a retail chain, social media has the potential to drive the bottom line at your brick-and-mortar location. Today’s highly social and mobile customers are already inside your store, sharing photos, asking their social networks for recommendations, and writing reviews about your services.

But you know that already. The question is, how do you connect your customers’ online experience to their in-store experience? It’s critical that their digital and physical buying journeys converge at one spot: the cash register. And there’s no shortage of promising new technologies in the retail space that are trying to do just that, including mobile payments and iBeacons. However, social media remains the easiest and most cost effective way for brick-and-mortar businesses to engage with their digitally empowered customers, both inside and outside the store.

In this blog post, I’ll show you 3 efficient ways that you can use social media and Hootsuite to:

Get more customers to walk through your door

Maintain strong relationships to keep them coming back

Drive in-store purchases

Gain insights into the customer experience

Monitor your reputation

Engage with Twitter users on your doorstep

With hundreds of millions of Tweets sent every day, Twitter’s constant stream of content has been likened to a firehose; if you attempt to drink it all in, you’re going to drown in a torrent of data. To effectively listen to the real-time social network, you need to filter out the information you don’t need and find the messages that matter. Twitter offers a number of powerful ways to narrow its search results, but for a brick-and-mortar business, there’s no search feature more important than location-based filtering.

By narrowing your search results to only show Tweets from within your city, neighborhood, or even your block, you can spend more time engaging with people who are literally in a position to buy from you. Your business can also engage with local Twitter users without being advertorial, such as by offering them directions to local shops and amenities. In this way, you can use social media to be a good neighbor and earn the local goodwill that is critical to the long-term health of your business.

Although you can use geo-filtering to see every geo-tagged Tweet that is sent within a given radius, it usually works best when you combine it with other listening techniques, such as keyword searches. A good rule of thumb is to make search terms more specific as you widen the geographic radius. For example, an athletic shoe store located in a shopping mall could set up two levels of location-based listening:

A hyper-local search stream that reveals every message sent from within the building, in order to identify shoppers who are looking for deals or buying athletic clothes at neighboring stores. At this range, it’s easy to identify sales opportunities without having to filter search results for the store’s brand or other specific keywords—Twitter users are in the mall, just steps away from the business.

A city-wide search for brand-, product-, and lifestyle-related keywords. At this range, it’s necessary to filter search results for relevance. The shoe store could listen for people in the city who are talking about the brand, discussing exercise routines, and asking for good places to go for a run. They can also listen for specific signals that indicate people are looking to purchase athletic footwear: “new shoes”, “old shoes”, “running shoes”, etc.

To gain a comprehensive view of relevant Twitter activity in your area, you can monitor multiple geo-filtered search streams side-by-side in the Hootsuite dashboard. Here’s how:

Click the crosshairs icon on the right side of the search field to find local search results.

The Twitter search stream will automatically refresh showing local search results within a 25 km radius from your current dashboard location.

To change the radius of your search, open the dropdown menu at the top of your stream and click “Preferences”. From there you will be able to manually adjust the radius as well as the GPS coordinates to focus your search.

How to use the Hootlet in Google Maps

The Hootlet, Hootsuite’s extension for the Chrome web browser, makes it even easier to find Tweets near a particular location by using Google Maps.

Simply highlight a location in Google Maps and click on the link, “Tweets near here”.

This will bring up a stream of Tweets from people nearby. You can adjust the geographic radius of your search, and even respond to Tweets directly from Google Maps through your Hootsuite account.

If you would like to save the stream for easy access in the future, click “Add to Hootsuite”.

See every Instagram post that matters

Instagram has emerged in recent years as one of the most actively engaged social networks. People use Instagram to express their identities and share memorable experiences with others, so it’s no surprise that it has become a vital space for businesses to interact with their customers. As a highly visual network, Instagram is also an invaluable way to create affinity for your brick-and-mortar location and the people who work there.

Good photography on Instagram can help create a meaningful sense of place and community around your store. Consider the following Instagram post from Starbucks. It perfectly encapsulates the in-store experience that Starbucks wants to create: a “third place between work and home”, where customers can engage in lively conversation.

The post is actually a “regram” of a customer’s photograph. Starbucks identified the original post, which was geo-tagged at one of their locations, and reached out to ask the customer if they could share it with a wider audience. Starbucks earned 117,000 likes for the regram, all without having to create original content. This episode clearly demonstrates the value of monitoring Instagram more deeply than the comments on your own posts. However, not every user will geo-tag their posts or mention your business’s Instagram handle.

To capture every opportunity on Instagram, use the Vidpiq app for Hootsuite. This versatile app allows you to monitor Instagram by location, hashtag or username. Location-based Instagram streams are excellent dashboard companions for your geo-filtered Twitter streams. Together, they allow you to track nearly all of the public photo sharing that’s occurring in your area.

Manage all of your online reviews

Even the best social engagement strategy can be undermined by a single weak point in your company’s digital presence: negative online reviews. Cone Research found that 4 out of 5 customers have reversed a purchase decision after reading a negative online review. On the flip side, positive reviews are strongly correlated with better sales. For example, research at Harvard Business School found that a one-star increase in Yelp ratings led to a 5% to 9% increase in revenue for restaurants.

Given the significant revenue impact of online reviews, it’s vital to monitor how your brick-and-mortar business is perceived online and to take action to improve your ratings wherever possible. A study conducted by Harris Interactive found that when retailers replied to negative reviews on social media and online ratings sites, 34% of customers who received a response deleted their original negative review, and 33% replaced it with a positive review. Even better, nearly a fifth of them went on to become loyal customers and made another purchase with the retailer.

It’s important to integrate online reviews into your overall social listening strategy to better understand your customer experience. Monitoring customer testimonials and complaints across all review sites and social networks will allow you to make meaningful improvements to your products and services, rapidly address negative customer feedback, and amplify positive reviews to increase their visibility among potential customers.

To save time and view multiple streams of online reviews from your Hootsuite dashboard, check out the ReviewInc, Reputology, and Review Trackers apps in the Hootsuite App Directory. These powerful apps allow you to centralize management of online reviews from numerous sites, including Google Reviews, Yelp, Facebook Reviews, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Foursquare, and Yahoo. In addition, all three apps can be used to monitor multiple storefronts from one convenient place.

Put social media to work for your brick and mortar location—drive sales and customer loyalty with Hootsuite!

]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-to-drive-business-to-store/feed/03 Ways Your Brick-and-Mortar Location Can Use Social Media To Drive BusinessWe go over cost effective ways to connect your customers’ online experience to their in-store experience & use social media to drive businesssocial media for small business,social media to drive business12 Modern Business Problems and The Social Apps to Solve Themhttp://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-apps-to-solve-business-problems-hootsuite-app-directory/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-apps-to-solve-business-problems-hootsuite-app-directory/#commentsWed, 26 Nov 2014 14:00:42 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=67081This week, we are proud to celebrate the third anniversary of the Hootsuite App Directory. With more than 100 apps and over 1.6 million app installations, the App... Read More

]]>This week, we are proud to celebrate the third anniversary of the Hootsuite App Directory. With more than 100 apps and over 1.6 million app installations, the App Directory has helped hundreds of thousands of social media managers, small business owners, and large organizations solve critical business problems in the Hootsuite dashboard. An average of 6 new apps are added to the directory every month, so it’s easier than ever before to integrate social media with other business tools to overcome key challenges.

Here are 12 ways your business can leverage the Hootsuite App Directory to save time and improve its bottom line:

1. How can I keep track of all the online reviews for my business?

Whether you’re a small business owner or a major enterprise, online reviews are critical to the health of your brand. Nine in ten consumers say online reviews influence their purchasing decisions. It’s hugely important to understand how your business is perceived online, and how to address customer feedback and amplify positive reviews to drive revenue. But monitoring all of the different review sites is time consuming, to say the least. There’s Google Reviews, Yelp, Facebook Reviews, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Foursquare, Yahoo—the list goes on.

The ReviewInc app in the Hootsuite App Directory will centralize review monitoring so you can save time and work more efficiently. View multiple streams of online reviews from over 200 popular review sites in one place, engage with customers, and share positive testimonials of your business to social networks. Large organizations can also use ReviewInc to manage reviews for multiple locations and coordinate workflows across teams.

2. How can I deliver faster customer service on social media?

Customers expect your organization to provide timely, high quality customer service on whichever channel they use to contact you. When they reach out to your company on social media, 32% of customers expect a response within 30 minutes, and 42% expect a response within 60 minutes. To meet those demands consistently, you need to be able to quickly identify, escalate, and resolve customer service issues found on social channels.

The Zendesk app for Hootsuite allows you to seamlessly create helpdesk tickets from social media messages in the Hootsuite dashboard, so every customer can receive a quick and accurate response from your help and support team. You can assign tickets to specific groups and team members, set ticket status and priority level, and much more.

3. How do I find more leads on Twitter?

Twitter is a treasure trove of potential customers openly sharing opinions, venting frustrations, and asking questions. But with 284 million monthly active users, the challenge lies in filtering out meaningful buying signals from all the noise.

The LeadSift app for Hootsuite filters through millions of Twitter conversations to find and classify leads by intent to buy, churn, and other categories. With the app you can quickly identify hot leads who are researching your product or service category or about to abandon one of your competitors. You can then engage with your leads immediately or save them in LeadSift for further tracking.

4. How do I create CRM leads from social media?

Finding leads on social media is only the first step toward a sale. The key to sales success is to nurture relationships, and to do that you’ll need to incorporate social media into your overall customer relationship management (CRM) strategy.

With Salesforce, SugarCRM, Nimble and other CRM apps for Hootsuite, you can seamlessly create CRM leads from your social media streams. Your leads will be warmer and of higher quality since they will be based on real-time insights and conversations with prospects. Enriching CRM with social intelligence will also help you nurture leads into big wins: PureMatter, a social agency, closed a deal worth nearly $1 million by combining Hootsuite’s social media management capabilities with Nimble’s CRM functionality.

5. How do I connect social media to my company’s marketing automation system?

Social media is a vital source of new leads and intelligence that can help you push your existing leads down the marketing funnel. But to really leverage social media for lead generation, you need to bridge the gap between social media engagement and marketing automation.

With the Marketo app for Hootsuite, you can easily connect social interactions in the Hootsuite dashboard to your Marketo lead database. Create new leads instantly, or add an additional layer of data to your existing lead records, all from the Hootsuite dashboard. By enhancing Marketo leads with social media intelligence, you can qualify them faster, shorten your sales cycle, and boost your company’s bottom line.

6. How can I see Instagram photos that are being posted near my location?

If you’re an event manager, small business owner, or social media manager for a franchise business, you know how important it is to monitor social media by geographic location. You might already be geo-filtering your Twitter searches to find hyper-local sales leads and build stronger relationships with customers. But what about Instagram? People are sharing photos to Instagram from right outside your door—if they’re not tagging your business or using your hashtag, you’re probably missing out on these prime opportunities for engagement altogether.

To catch every Instagram post near your store or at your event, use the Vidpiq app for Hootsuite. You can limit your search radius to your building, your neighborhood, your city, or whatever scope matches your business needs.

7. What are people saying about my business on Reddit?

Reddit, which calls itself the “front page of the internet”, is a powerful content discovery platform. But it’s more than just a source of traffic for your website. It’s also home to a highly engaged and dynamic community that exerts massive online influence. Memes, discussions, and controversies that erupt on Reddit can rapidly spread across other social networks and into the mainstream media, leaving PR and marketing professionals to play catch-up. When people start talking about your business on Reddit, it pays to know about it right away.

The Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro app allows you to track mentions of your company, products and competitors across all of Reddit, so you can respond proactively to every key opportunity or mitigate potential PR situations right at the source. You can monitor keywords and phrases from customizable streams in your Hootsuite dashboard, and view analytics reports on keyword occurrences over time. You can also share Reddit posts easily across your social networks or jump straight into Reddit threads to respond and engage.

8. How do I integrate email marketing and social media marketing?

As marketing strategist Jay Baer says, email marketing and social media marketing are “two sides of the same coin.” Your company should be looking to not only grow, but converge the audiences on these two critical channels. Ideally, all of your Twitter followers and Facebook fans would also be email subscribers, and vice versa.

With the MailChimp app for Hootsuite, you can easily view whether a Twitter or Facebook user is a subscriber to your MailChimp Lists, so you can target them with optimal messaging in either channel. The integration also allows you to easily monitor MailChimp email campaigns from within Hootsuite. Save time by tracking the social reach, impact, and overall performance of an email campaign from the same dashboard you use for social engagement and analytics.

9. How can I schedule my videos on YouTube and Vimeo?

There’s more to successful video content marketing than simply making good videos. If you want your videos to get the views they deserve, they need to be the centerpiece of a multi-channel promotional campaign that is planned and scheduled in advance.

With the YouTube and Vimeo apps in the Hootsuite App Directory, you can schedule and upload your videos in bulk, right from your Hootsuite dashboard. Keep up a regular video publishing calendar to keep users coming back and content fresh. The apps also allow you to add titles, descriptions, tags, and categories, as well as privacy and license settings.

10. How can I find good content to share with my audience?

Content curation has become a valuable tactic for any marketing department to keep online audiences engaged and informed. By discovering, sorting, and sharing useful third-party content, you can create value for customers while also demonstrating industry knowledge and expertise. However, finding relevant content on a consistent basis can be challenging and time-consuming for busy marketers.

With the Talkwalker Free News Alerts app for Hootsuite, you can receive custom alerts whenever your interests appear on blogs, message boards, news sites, social media and more—in 187 languages and 247 countries. This comprehensive content discovery app can also be used to monitor your company, your name, your brand, or your industry, which also makes it a powerful tool for PR professionals. When you find valuable articles and stories worth sharing with your followers, you can easily distribute them to your social networks from Hootsuite.

11. How do I know which hashtags to use?

Including popular or trending hashtags in your social messages can increase their visibility, but not necessarily with your business’ target audience. In fact, “trendjacking” an irrelevant hashtag can backfire by making your business look desperate or out of touch. A better alternative is to use the hashtags that your community actually follows, so you can increase engagement with people who matter to your business.

To see at a glance which hashtags are being tweeted by the people you follow, check out the Nexalogy app in the Hootsuite App Directory. The app can also find the most popular hashtags related to a given search term, so you can stay current with all the emerging hashtags in your industry or target market.

12. Who are the people in my Twitter audience, really?

Understanding your audience on every channel is critical to your business’ marketing strategy. But as your Twitter following grows larger, it can be easy to lose track of who your followers really are.

The Demographics Pro for Twitter app gives you incredible audience insights for any Twitter account, including gender split, average age, income, top cities, occupations, likes, interests, brand affiliations and more. The app also makes it easy to analyze the audiences of people who are tweeting hashtags. The next time you use a hashtag in a marketing campaign, you’ll not only be able to see who is tweeting it, but which demographic groups are being reached.

]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-apps-to-solve-business-problems-hootsuite-app-directory/feed/0AppDirectory-Gifs-ZenDesk (1)AppDirectory-Gifs-MailChimpAppDirectory-Gifs-hashtagsHow Startup Canada Uses Social Media To Successfully Promote Eventshttp://blog.hootsuite.com/startup-canada-success-story/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/startup-canada-success-story/#commentsTue, 25 Nov 2014 17:30:37 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=67032On November 26, hundreds of Canadian entrepreneurs, investors, industry leaders, and government decision makers will meet in Ottawa for Startup Canada Day on the Hill. The event is a... Read More

]]>On November 26, hundreds of Canadian entrepreneurs, investors, industry leaders, and government decision makers will meet in Ottawa for Startup Canada Day on the Hill. The event is a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs to interact with political leaders and make connections with some of the country’s most respected startup mentors. For Startup Canada, a grassroots network of entrepreneurs, the event is the culmination of months of preparation and tireless promotion.

Startup Canada has actively used social media to build a community of entrepreneurs since it was founded in 2012. As the organization planned its second annual Day on the Hill, Startup Canada wanted to use social media to:

Generate awareness of the event

Drive attendance through registration

Provide recognition for partners, sponsors, and exhibitors

Using Hootsuite, Startup Canada achieved all of their social media goals. Here’s how they did it, in 5 easy steps:

1. Coordinate your team

Startup Canada represents more than 85,000 entrepreneurs, 400 enterprise support partners, 300 volunteers, and 20 Startup Communities that are spread across six time zones. To keep everyone involved and talking about the Day on the Hill event, Startup Canada needed to work together seamlessly with their sponsors, speakers, and media partners. But first, they needed to work together as a team.

Before getting everyone on the same social relationship platform, Startup Canada’s social media team used a variety of tools to monitor, engage, and publish social media content. This led to confusion and duplication of effort within the team. It was difficult to tell which team member was engaged in a given conversation, and nobody could be sure what content would be published on which social channel, or when.

Startup Canada consolidated their team of staff, volunteers, and contract workers into Hootsuite, which allowed them to collaborate and engage with their community far more effectively. When tracking @mentions, keywords, and hashtags, they were able to see which messages had received a response, and from whom. They could also assign incoming mentions and direct messages to other team members, so no critical issue went unresolved. Melloney Campbell, VP of Communications for Startup Canada, gained an overview of all team activity and could review all outgoing messages before they went live.

2. Schedule social content to save time

“We’ve pooled our scheduling into the Hootsuite platform so we can have greater visibility and control of content that’s being published across all of our networks.”— Melloney Campbell, VP of Communications for Startup Canada

Promoting a major event over a period of several months requires a lot of outbound messaging on your social channels. To save time and provide a steady flow of content on Twitter and Facebook, Startup Canada used Hootsuite to schedule some of its promotional messaging in advance. The Hootsuite Publisher allowed their team to collaboratively maintain an ongoing schedule of social messages on a week-to-week basis. They were able to avoid duplicate posts and see exactly how often they were promoting the Day on the Hill event to avoid flooding their followers’ feeds.

3. Monitor social media to identify advocates

In the early stages of your promotion strategy, it’s critical to generate as much awareness as possible and create interest that can help attract new exhibitors, attendees, and speakers. To do that, you’ll need ambassadors who can spread the word and generate goodwill on your behalf. Using a hashtag—and encouraging other people to use it—is an effective way to consolidate the conversation about your event and will help you identify advocates.

Months before the Day on the Hill and before the full speaker list had even been announced, Startup Canada used Hootsuite to monitor social media and identify the people who were using their event hashtag, retweeting their Tweets, and sharing their Facebook posts. They also watched who was sharing media stories and partner content about the Day on the Hill, and then reached out to engage with them.

4. Promote your speakers, not just your event

Social media allows you to create an emotional connection between attendees and speakers before your event even begins. In the weeks leading up to the Day on the Hill, Startup Canada used social media to introduce various speakers to their social audience, which not only helped to drive registrations but also encouraged a strong and engaged community of attendees to form around discussions with the speakers. Simply @mentioning speakers in social messaging about your event is a great way to promote them and makes it easy for people to learn more about their background. For greater engagement, involve speakers in Google Hangouts on Air or live webinars. These online experiences generate excitement leading up to your event and give people a taste of what they can expect from speakers when they see them in person.

A9 They’re a great way to reward your audience & to gain more interest in your product/service/business #startupchats@Startup_Canada — Debbie Weinstein (@DebbieLWLaw) July 23, 2014

Startup Canada’s prefered method for getting speakers engaged with potential attendees was a regular Twitter chat on the #StartupChats hashtag. These educational chats were focused on Startup Canada’s mission of empowering entrepreneurs. Speakers were able to interact organically with the community, demonstrate expertise, and promote the event at a more intimate level.

5. Co-create social content with partners and exhibitors

Creating enough social content to drive engagement around your event can be challenging, especially if you are a non-profit, volunteer-driven organization like Startup Canada. But you likely have more resources at your disposal than you think. In fact, every relationship your organization develops is another chance for content creation. Present your sponsors, speakers, and exhibitors with mutually beneficial opportunities and they will jump at the chance to drive brand awareness or sales with a new audience.

If your organization contributes to a partner’s project, make sure that the topic is relevant to your audience. Don’t waste time and energy on unrelated content just for the sake of getting brand exposure. The content should be useful to the people who you are trying to attract to your event. For example, Startup Canada partnered with Intuit, an event sponsor, for a live Google Hangout aimed at helping entrepreneurs scale up their businesses.

With these 5 steps, Startup Canada met their goals and have had hundreds of people register to attend Day on the Hill. After integrating social media into their event promotion strategy, they expect to see a 50% growth in attendees from last year. To follow Startup Canada’s Day on the Hill event, use the hashtag #StartupDay.

]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/startup-canada-success-story/feed/0How Startup Canada Uses Social Media To Successfully Promote EventsStartup Canada is organizing a networking event for Canadian entrepreneurs & social media was a logical tool to promote the eventStartUp Canada,success story,Startup CanadaPinpoint And Engage The People Who Matter Most With PeerIndex App For Hootsuitehttp://blog.hootsuite.com/peerindex-piq-app-hootsuite/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/peerindex-piq-app-hootsuite/#commentsThu, 20 Nov 2014 12:00:44 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=66929It’s hard to find an article about social media these days that doesn’t mention the words “influence” or “influencers”. Most of them encourage you to build and leverage... Read More

]]>It’s hard to find an article about social media these days that doesn’t mention the words “influence” or “influencers”. Most of them encourage you to build and leverage relationships with key individuals such as journalists, analysts, and bloggers who can influence large audiences into buying your products. But the social media user with the greatest potential for your business isn’t always the one with the biggest following. They could be one of your own satisfied customers, or someone whose small audience is highly influential in your target market. The trick is finding them consistently and engaging with them in a timely manner.

To help your business put the abstract science of social media influence into practice, Hootsuite has teamed up with PeerIndex, an audience measurement specialist. PeerIndex tracks the ripple effect of your online voice across interests and communities by measuring how people consume and share your content. They help business owners, marketers, community managers, and sales professionals define target audiences and identify key influencers for their brand. Now you can take that intelligence and apply immediately in the Hootsuite dashboard to power social media engagement.

The PeerIndex PiQ app for Hootsuite allows you to easily sift through over 315 million indexed Twitter accounts to find relevant social media users that matter to your business. Use the app’s advanced search to identify key customers and influencers, and then engage with them seamlessly through Hootsuite.

Pinpoint the people that matter in your industry

There are plenty of influential people on social media, but which of them are actually relevant to your business? With the PeerIndex PiQ app, you can identify the most active, engaged, and authoritative social media users in your field.

Turn authority into loyalty

As your social audience grows, it’s critical to understand who is actually sharing your content, driving brand awareness, and exerting real influence. Using PeerIndex and Hootsuite, you can identify the most authoritative members of your community and then reach out to transform them into dedicated brand ambassadors.

Gain insights into any Twitter user

Just drag and drop a Twitter user’s avatar into your PeerIndex PiQ stream to see their PeerIndex score and other actionable insights.

How active they are

How often other users engage with them

How influential their followers are

There are two versions of the PeerIndex PiQ app: free and paid. Upgrade to the paid app for these additional benefits:

Additional filters (Human and Gender) have been added to search (vs. country and location only with free app)

Each search will now return up to 1,000 results (vs. 20 with free app)

]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/peerindex-piq-app-hootsuite/feed/0peerindex_scrn1PeerIndex Paid Hootsuite appThe 2014 Social Media Glossary: 154 Essential Definitionshttp://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-managers-definitive-glossary-2014/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-managers-definitive-glossary-2014/#commentsThu, 23 Oct 2014 16:20:33 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=66151Welcome to the 2014 edition of the Hootsuite Social Media Glossary. This is a living document that will continue to grow as we add more terms and expand... Read More

]]>Welcome to the 2014 edition of the Hootsuite Social Media Glossary. This is a living document that will continue to grow as we add more terms and expand our definitions. If there’s a term you would like to see added, let us know in the comments!

+1 button

Similar to Facebook’s “Like” button, the +1 button is proprietary to Google and is the Internet equivalent of the thumbs-up. “+1” may also show up in emails or comment threads, as in the following: “+1 for that idea” with the meaning of “I really like this idea and I’m showing my support for it.”

#

/r/

—A—

Abandonment rate

The percentage of social customer service issues that are abandoned by customers without a resolution.

Algorithm

A rules-based procedure for making calculations or solving problems. Algorithms are everywhere in computer science and are crucial to the software that runs the world. In social media, the most important algorithms are those that determine which content we see. For example, your Facebook News Feed doesn’t show every status update and every photo from every one of your friends. Instead, it displays an algorithmically curated set of content that Facebook thinks is most worth seeing. Similarly, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus use algorithms to define which topics and hashtags are currently trending.

Like the algorithms that power search engines, social media algorithms have a massive effect on your brand’s online visibility. One sure-fire way to increase your ranking in an algorithm is to pay for it with paid social media.

Analytics

Analytics tells you what happened. In general, it involves using technology to gather data which analysts can study.The goal of analysts is to examine this data, looking for patterns in behavior. The most common way of gathering data is using a tracking tag on a website or software application. The tag registers a “session” when a user visits and then stores data about what pages they visited, what actions they completed, and how they interacted with different elements such as clicking on buttons or performing a search.

Archiving

The practice of retaining an organization’s social media messages and associated metadata, often for the purpose of regulatory compliance. Archiving has become increasingly important as more and more business communications occur on social media. Organizations can save records of social conversations in their own secure databases, much like they already store email and other documents. This data can later be retrieved and analyzed to track the effectiveness of social media activities. It can also be gathered as part of a legal e-discovery process.

Audience selector

A tool that allows you to choose which audience you want to share something with on Facebook. To learn more about Facebook’s privacy settings for sharing content, see this Facebook Help article.

Authenticity

Some people cover up their identity and don’t really express themselves on social media. Being open and authentic on social media means a great deal to your audience who wants to genuinely engage with you or your business. It’s important to find your own voice and be personal on social media. We wouldn’t be following you if we didn’t think you were awesome, so just be yourself!

Avatar

A visual representation of a user online, though not necessarily an actual photo of the user. Social media profile pics are an example of an avatar. Fun trivia fact: “avatar” is Sanskrit for “incarnation”. Makes sense, right?

Average handling time

The average time required for a company, team, or individual to resolve customer issues on social media, from beginning to end.

Average response time

How long it takes on average for a company, team, or individual to reply to a customer’s messages while resolving an issue.

—B—

Big data

In short, big data is large sets of unstructured data. Traditionally, the data that we analyze has already been formatted into nice rows and columns. Think of a spreadsheet with a list of customer names and email addresses. The reason why big data is hard to analyze is that the data sets are massive and complex. They might contain the messy natural language we find in Tweets and Facebook updates, so the challenge involves sorting, analyzing, and processing. But as the data sets are so large and layered with information, good analysis can reveal surprising insights.

Bio

A ‘Bio’, short for biography, is the small portion of your online profile that explains to new or potential followers who you are. All social platforms have some version of a Bio as they are valuable in attracting new followers with similar interests. When it comes to your Twitter strategy, your Bio is the first thing users see when they discover your profile and a good Bio can greatly improve how often you show up in keyword searches.

Block

having their mentions and replies appear in your notifications or mentions tab

tagging you in a photo

Blocking is a useful way to keep a troublesome user out of your mentions and sends them an explicit signal that you want nothing to do with them. However, Twitter cannot prevent anybody from seeing your public Tweets. If you want to keep your Tweets private, then use a protected account.

Board

Brand advocate

In the marketing world, a brand advocate is a customer that is so satisfied with your product that they go out of their way to help you market it. Travel back in time a bit to the 90s and remember Jared of Subway fame. He was more than just a catchy theme song, but a brand advocate who ate at Subway every day as a diet regimen and told the story of his diet and subsequent weight loss to journalists. He was soon picked up by Subway as an official spokesperson. Social media is filled with brand advocates who share good news about their favourite products—with over a billion people on Facebook, that’s a lot of potential Jareds.

Brandjacking

The hijacking of a brand to promote an agenda or damage a reputation. Brandjackers don’t hack the social media accounts of target individuals and organizations. Instead, they assume a target’s online identity through indirect means such as fake accounts, promoted hashtags, and satirical marketing campaigns.

—C—

Canoe Tweet

Center of Excellence

A steering committee or dedicated team of social media leaders that establishes policies and processes and supports an organization with best practices, education, and training. A Center of Excellence may also serve as an operational hub for the organization’s day-to-day social media activities.

Circles

Google+ Circles are a method for sorting your Google+ contacts by social context, location, shared interest, or any other criteria. They allow you to organize people on Google+ to match the way you actually know them in real life. With Circles, you can easily share different content with different categories of people. You can also filter what other people are sharing that you never miss an important update from your closest friends and family.

Clickbait

Web content with a misleading or sensationalist headline that entices readers to click through to the full story, usually with the goal of generating page views and advertising revenue. This One Weird Trick works by piquing your curiosity. You click the link, but You Won’t Believe What Happens Next: the article stinks. Clickbait has infested social media so thoroughly that Facebook has actually taken steps to exterminate it.

Clickthrough rate (CTR)

This is a common metric for reporting on the number of people who viewed a message or piece of content and then actually performed the action required such as clicking on the ad or link in an email marketing campaign. The actual metric is calculated by comparing the number of clicks to impressions. For example, if 100 people saw your ad in Google and one person clicked on the ad, you would have a click-through-rate of 1.0%. Clickthrough rate (CTR) is most commonly used for search engine marketing and other performance-driven channels as the general philosophy is that the higher your CTR, the more effective your marketing is.

Community management

The practice of developing relationships around a common interest. This is done by monitoring and engaging with those who engage with the common interest. The goal is to nurture relationships so that the community acts as advocates on behalf of the common interest.

Competitor sentiment

To provide context, it can be useful to measure your sentiment alongside that of your competitors through social media monitoring. This kind of intel—whether positive or negative—will allow you to make strategic business decisions to stay ahead of your competition.

Compliance

Conformance with rules, regulations, or laws. Social media compliance is particularly relevant to organizations in regulated industries, such as healthcare, banking, and insurance. These businesses face strict rules governing what they can communicate to the public, and numerous regulatory agencies have confirmed that these rules extend to social media. Among other requirements, regulated organizations must be able to demonstrate that they are archiving social communications and supervising the use of social media by their employees.

Connection

On LinkedIn, there are several types of connections you can make. The basic type of connection is a 1st degree connection—a contact that you know personally or professionally and that has accepted your invitation to connect. Other degrees of connections are dependant on your extended network and how closely they are connected to other individuals you know.

Content curation

Content curation is the process of sifting through the web to find the best and most relevant content for an audience and then presenting it to them in a meaningful way. Unlike content marketing, content curation doesn’t involve publishing new content. Instead, it’s about creating value for your audience by saving them time and effort. There’s no shortage of content out there, but not all of it is worth reading. Plus, there’s no guarantee that the best articles, videos, and infographics will show up on the first page of a Google search. Organizing related content into pinboards, newsletters, or weekly blog posts can help you build a regular audience and also demonstrate your subject expertise.

Content discovery

A process used by marketers to uncover valuable content and trends relevant to their audience. Content discovery helps shape a successful content marketing strategy and can be executed in numerous ways.

Content management system (CMS)

Whether you’re running a blog, marketing website, or a social media presence, a content management system (CMS) is the backbone of your content marketing strategy. A web CMS is an online application that allows you to draft, share, edit, schedule, and index your content. Popular web content management systems make use of simple editors that allow you to create publish content without demanding a knowledge of code.

Content marketing

A marketing strategy based on attracting and retaining customers through the creation and distribution of valuable content, such as videos, white papers, guides, and infographics. Content marketers look to earn customer loyalty and influence decisions by providing useful, entertaining, or educational media. A famous example of content marketing is the Michelin Guide, first published by the tire company Michelin in 1900. Rather than telling people to buy their tires, Michelin provided maps, advice on car repairs, lists of hotels, and other valuable information that would encourage car ownership. Over time the Michelin Guide evolved into the world’s most influential guide to restaurants—driving massive brand awareness and loyalty for Michelin. With the rise of social media and search engines, content marketing is now a vital technique for businesses of all sizes.

Conversions

In social media marketing, a conversion is a positive action that is taken on a website by a visitor from social media. The action demonstrates that the visitor is “converting” into a customer. Sales aren’t the only type of conversion; many websites measure webinar registrations, newsletter signups, content downloads, and other important outcomes that ultimately lead to a sale. Tracking conversions is crucial to properly attributing revenue to social media.

Conversation map

A visualization of the terms that are most commonly associated with a chosen keyword on social media. Usually delivered as a percentage of total mentions, a Conversation Map is a feature in Hootsuite Analytics that collects data from over 25 sources across the web.

Cover photo

The large, horizontal image at the top of your Facebook profile or page. Similar to a profile photo, a cover photo is public and can be seen by anyone. This is a great place for individuals, brands and organizations to use an unique image to represent who they are, what their business is or what they care about.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons is a public copyright license that gives you the ability to use and share otherwise copyrighted material. For social media users, Creative Commons often comes into play when we are looking for images and photos to accompany a social media message or blog post. In both of these cases, unless you are using your own images or have express permission, you can only share Creative Commons images. Sites like Google Image Search and Flickr have filters so you can easily search for Creative Commons photos. Just be careful, as there are different level of Creative Commons which could restrict whether an image could be used commercially, whether it can be modified, and what kind of attribution is required.

Creep

To creep is to spend an extended period of time looking through someone’s profiles, photos, and videos on social media. The term is generally used in the context of dating, where social networks such as Facebook give users the ability to check out potential dates or ex-partners. At least, that’s what people tell us. We’ve never, ever done it. Ever.

Crisis management

The social media governance measures a company has in place to manage social media risk and react in the event of a crisis. A crisis can include a wide range of possibilities, from security hacks to mis-Tweets and even external events that result in an influx in social mentions (ex. a natural disaster’s impact on the Red Cross). Crisis management is vital to large organizations that seek to manage social media risk and respond effectively.

Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing refers to the process of leveraging your online community to assist in services, content and ideas for your business. Business examples include getting your audience to volunteer in helping translate your product or by asking your community to contribute content for your blog.

—D—

Deflection rate

The percentage of social customer service issues which are transferred to another communications channel, such as email, the phone, or live chat.

Direct Message

A direct message (DM) is a private Twitter message sent to one of your followers. Direct messages can only be sent to a Twitter user who is already following you, and you can only receive direct messages from users you follow.

Discover

A feature on the Twitter platform that has 5 functions: Tweets, Activity, Who to Follow, Find Friends and Popular accounts.

The Tweets option shows the most popular Tweets across Twitter; some are tailored to you individually and some are globally trending.

The Activity tab shows notable engagements of the people you follow, including the latest Retweets, replies and favorites of your friends.

Who to Follow helps you find new and interesting accounts.

Find Friends allows you to import contacts from your contact book and find them on Twitter.

Popular Accounts provides a list of some engaging and well-liked accounts on Twitter and is delivered to you based on your interests.

Display Ad

Display ads are typically small visual banners that are shown on websites. Common formats include images, flash, video, and audio. They can also be text-based (for example, Google AdWords lets you build text-based display ads). In general, display ads are used for large audience-based media buys or retargeting.

—E—

Electronic discovery (e-discovery)

The gathering an exchange of relevant electronic records (such as social media communications) during a legal case or government investigation. Many organizations are required to securely and consistently archive all digital communications so that they can be produced in e-discovery.

Embedded media

Digital media that is displayed within another piece of content, outside of its native setting.

Employee advocate

An employee that is willing to promote and defend a company both online and off. Like other brand advocates, passionate employees can influence the purchasing decisions of their friends, family, and other social contacts.

Employee amplification

The re-sharing of a company’s social content by its employees. Organized and coordinated amplification programs leverage employee advocates at scale to greatly increase the social reach of a brand.

Empowerment model

An organizational approach to social media which emphasizes participation and initiative from all departments, teams, and employees.

Engagement

Social media engagement refers to the acts of talking to, messaging or otherwise interacting with other people on social networks. This broad term encompasses a several different types of actions on social media, from commenting on Facebook posts to participating in Twitter chats. At its simplest, social media engagement is any interaction you have with other users. For that reason, it’s a core part of every social media strategy. Your followers expect your to interact with them. Being social is core to social media, after all.

Engagement rate

Engagement rate is the percentage of people who saw your social media post and actively engaged with it (clicked the link, expanded the image attached, replied, liked, favorited, shared, Retweeted, etc). Engagement rate is a valuable metric to help determine the quality and success of your social media messaging, as it provides an indicator as to how interesting or useful the message was to your audience. Twitter Analytics provides in-depth engagement rate data for every Tweet you send.

Extended circles

On Google+, your extended circles include all the people in your circles, plus all the people in your circles’ circles. In other words, everyone within two degrees of separation.

When you share something on Google+, you can choose to share it with your extended circles. That post could then appear on the Home page of somebody in one of your circles, where it would be visible to people in their circles.

—F—

Facebook Group

A space on Facebook where you can communicate and share content within a select group of people. There are three types of groups: public, closed, and secret. Make sure you understand the privacy settings of any group that you’re a member of (here’s a useful table for reference). You can join a maximum of 6000 Facebook groups. If that ever becomes a problem for you, we’d love to hear your story.

Facebook Network

Your Facebook Network is the web of people whom you are friends with on Facebook. The term expresses the inherent sense of connectivity users experience on the Facebook platform, where a web of updates and information are delivered to you from all the people in your life.

Facebook Reach

The number of unique people who have seen content from your Facebook Page. Reach is not the same as impressions, which is the total number of times your content is viewed (including multiple views from the same user). Facebook provides two different reach metrics: total reach and post reach.

Total reach is the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your Page during the last 7 days. This includes people who view your Page posts, people who visit your Page after searching for it, and people who see ads that are associated with your Page.

Post reach is the number of unique people who have seen a particular Facebook Page post in their News Feed.

If you have ever added up the post reach from of all your posts and wondered why the sum didn’t match your total reach, you’re not alone. The main reason for this apparent discrepancy is that total reach only counts people once, no matter how many posts they have viewed in the past 7 days. Total reach also includes people who have seen your ads and those who have visited your Page directly from search or an external link.

The two primary categories of Facebook reach can be broken down further into organic and paid reach.

Organic reach is free reach. It refers to the number of unique people who saw your content without your having to pay for it. The vast majority of organic reach occurs when Facebook’s algorithm places your posts in the News Feeds of your fans.

Paid reach is not free reach. It refers to the number of unique people who saw your content because you paid for promoted posts or display ads.

Facebook Fans

The people who like your Facebook Page.

Favorite

An indication that someone likes your Tweet, given by clicking the star icon.

First response time

A measurement how long it takes a company to give its first response to a customer’s comment or inquiry on social media. This can be a key performance indicator for social customer service, because even if the issue is not resolved immediately, a quick first response demonstrates that the company is listening and willing to help.

Follower

A Twitter user who has subscribed to your Twitter account so they can receive your Tweets in their Home feed. If you want to send them a direct message, you need to follow them back.

Following

The number of accounts that a Twitter handle is following.

Follows

The number of accounts that are following a Twitter handle.

Forum

An online site, also known as a message board, where people can hold discussions

Foursquare

A location-based discovery service that helps people find local places and experiences that are relevant to their interests and tastes. Foursquare pioneered the “check-in” back in 2009, putting the idea of real-time location sharing on the map. The company has since launched a separate app called Swarm that is exclusively dedicated to checking in and keeping up with your friends’ locations.

Friend

A person that you connect with on Facebook or another social network. Unlike a fan or follower, a friend is a two-way connection; both you and your friend have to endorse the relationship.

Friendship page

Facebook Friendship pages show the story of a friendship between two people connected on Facebook. They display a variety of content, including photos that both people are tagged in, public messages that they have exchanged, and their their mutual friends and interests.

—G—

Geolocation, geotagging

The practice of tagging a photo, video, or message with a specific location. The ubiquity of GPS-enabled smartphones has made geotagging a core aspect of social media.

Geotargetting

A feature on many social media platforms that allows users to share their content with geographically defined audiences. Instead of sending a generic message for the whole world to see, you can refine the messaging and language of your content to better connect with people in specific cities, countries, and regions. You can also filter your audience by language.

GIF

Gif (pronounced jif, apparently) is the acronym for Graphics Interchange Format, which refers to a file format that supports both static and animated images. Gifs rose to popularity as they allow you to essentially present a short video clip in a far more condensed image format, leading to such joyous gifs as the following.

Only certain social networks support gifs, including Google+ and Twitter. For all your gif needs, we suggest giphy.com.

—H—

Handle

Handle is another way of saying your account name. Hootsuite’s Twitter handle is @Hootsuite, for example. It’s important that you try and maintain consistent handles on all of your social network profiles, since people who follow you on Twitter might want to find you on Instagram or Pinterest. A consistent handle helps with discoverability.

Hashtag

The hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by the “#” sign. #Hashtags are a simple way to mark the topic (or topics) of social media messages and make them discoverable to people with shared interests. On most social networks, clicking a hashtag will reveal all the public and recently published messages that also contain that hashtag. Hashtags first emerged on Twitter as a user-created phenomenon and are now used on almost every other social media platform, including Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Vine and Pinterest.

—I—

Impressions

Inbound marketing

Inbound volume

The total number of incoming messages addressed to an organization or a specific social media account within a given time span.

Influencer

A social media user who can reach a significant audience and drive awareness about a trend, topic, company, or product. From a marketer’s perspective, the ideal influencer is also a passionate brand advocate. However, influencers often try to remain impartial toward brands in order to maintain credibility with their hard-earned audiences. Successful influencer strategies usually involve the coordination of Marketing, Customer Service, and Public Relations teams.

—J—

—K—

Klout Score

A numerical rating of online social influence, ranging from 1 to 100. Klout rates a social media user based on the size of their social networks and how other users interact with their content. The company defines influence as “the ability to drive action” and measures hundreds of signals from Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Wikipedia, and its own network. You can increase your Klout score by connecting multiple platforms to your Klout profile.

—L—

Like

Derived from the dictionary-approved meaning (children like ice cream, duh), to like something on social media is a Facebook invention that’s evolved into an understood expression of support for content. Along with shares, comments, and favorites, likes can be tracked as proof of engagement. Facebook’s algorithm adjusts individual content feeds based on like patterns, making for interesting results when consciously meddled with.

Like-baiting

The practice of explicitly requesting likes (or shares and comments) to increase engagement on Facebook. Facebook has adjusted its algorithm to reduce the visibility of like-baiting posts in users’ news feeds.

LinkedIn endorsement

A LinkedIn member’s recognition of another person’s skill, such as Content Marketing, Web Programming, or Rocket Science (we’re still waiting on Endorsements for that last one). Endorsements boost your credibility on LinkedIn by indicating that you actually have the skills you say you have. You can only endorse the skills of your first-degree connections.

LinkedIn Influencer

A top industry leader or other high profile professional who has been invited to publish on LinkedIn. LinkedIn Influencers include Bill Gates, Richard Branson, and Hootsuite CEO Ryan Holmes. Although every LinkedIn user can use the social network as a publishing platform, the LinkedIn Influencer program is invitation-only.

LinkedIn recommendation

A written compliment from one of your connections that you can display on your LinkedIn profile to impress hiring managers, potential customers, and that really interesting person you met at TEDxToledo. There’s no limit to how many recommendations you can give or request, but remember that the most authentic recommendations come from people that you’ve actually worked with. If you receive a lackluster recommendation that you would rather not display, then you can easily hide it from your profile. You’re also able to edit, remove, or hide your recommendation from another LinkedIn member’s profile at any time, like when a co-worker steals your sandwich from the office fridge.

List

A curated set of Twitter accounts that that you can group together in their own timeline. Lists are a convenient way to organize other Twitter users, whether you follow them or not. When you create a Twitter list, you can choose to make it public or private. Private lists are good for cataloguing sales prospects and sworn enemies, while public lists are available for anyone to subscribe to. They’re an effective method of content curation and a great way to show that you know who’s who in a particular field or cultural niche.

—M—

Marketing automation

A combination of tactics and technology platforms which enable businesses to automatically deliver personalized content to prospects and customers through a variety of online channels, such as social media, email, and websites. Basically, it’s giving people the information that they need, when they need it, and doing it consistently at scale. That’s why the “automation” part is so important. In an ideal system, marketers set up some clever logic for categorizing and “scoring” potential customers, as well as the processes for nurturing them with timely content. Then they put their feet up and relax as the technology takes over, moving leads down the marketing funnel towards a purchase.

Of course, it’s much more complicated in practice, but let’s focus on how social media fits into the equation. A marketing automation system always needs new leads at the top of the funnel—otherwise there’s nobody to nurture. Social media marketing and content marketing strategies can attract new inbound leads, providing essential fuel for the marketing automation engine. Marketers can also make that engine more efficient by using social media data to score their leads more accurately.

Meme

An idea, fashion, or behavior that is transmitted from person to person through media, speech, gestures, and other forms of communication. The term was conceived by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in the 1970s, but it has exploded into greater relevance in the past decade with the rise of online culture. If you’ve spent more than five seconds on the internet, you’ve probably encountered a meme; whether it was a classic like All Your Base or Dancing Baby, or a modern masterpiece like Doge or Grumpy Cat, you likely felt compelled to share it, upvote it, or remix it.

In Dawkins’ theory, memes are ideas (or fragments of ideas) that are copied and combined as they move from person to person, much like genes are passed down from generation to generation. Dawkins surmised that we could use the concept of evolution by natural selection to understand how ideas spread and change over time. Some memes spread far and wide, some die out, and others mutate. Social media has made it possible to visualize and measure this phenomenon like never before. For example, we can see hashtags rise and fall in popularity and track how quickly they spread throughout a network.

Ready to get meta? The word meme is itself a meme. The theory isn’t perfect, and it has its share of critics, but it’s an alluringly simple way to think about the spread of ideas. Therefore, people use the word and pass it on. Its meaning has also evolved over time as it has become increasingly used to describe viral social media content.

Mention

The act of tagging another user’s handle or account name in a social media message. Mentions typically trigger a notification for that user and are a key part of what makes social media “social”. When properly formatted (for example, as an @mention on Twitter or +mention on Google+), a mention also allows your audience to click through to the mentioned users’ bio or profile.

Multi-channel attribution

When people buy products, they rarely complete a purchase in one step. For example, they might hear about a brand from a Tweet, later see a banner ad for the product, and then perform a Google search, and then, many days later, finally visit the website to purchase. Multi-channel attribution attempts to give relative value to each of these channels, treating each channel as contributing and moving the customer towards purchase. This is practically done by using a web analytics program (such as Google Analytics). The goal is to better understand how your customer discovers, evaluates, and purchases your products or services and to develop a holistic understanding of the different influence of marketing channels such as social media, organic search, paid media, and email marketing.

Mute

There are always a handful of people on Twitter that you feel obligated to follow because you know that if you unfollowed them, they’d take it completely the wrong way. Perhaps it’s your boss, your overly-dramatic friend, or your #mom who #loves #talking (it’s not you mom, it’s your 25 Tweets per day). Mute is a feature available on Twitter that allows you to remove select people from your feed without them ever knowing. They still see that you follow them, and they can still favorite, retweet, and reply to you—you just don’t see any of their activity in your timeline. Muting a user is not the same as blocking them.

—N—

Net Promoter Score

A customer loyalty metric that is based on the following question: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend our company, product, or service to a friend or colleague?” People who respond with a 9 or 10 are designated as “promoters”; a 7 or 8 as “passives”; and a 6 or lower as “detractors”. The percentage of customers that are detractors is then subtracted from the percentage that are promoters to arrive at the company’s NPS (passives are ignored, because that’s their lot in life). Scores range from +100 to -100, but an actual NPS at either of those extremes would cause heart attacks in the board room of a real-world business.

Newsjacking

The act of referencing or involving yourself in a news story or event in order to connect with the audience following or discussing that story. Injecting your own story into a news story has become much easier with social media, as users can simply use hashtags or search terms to attach their content to breaking news. That being said, newsjacking should only be done if there is a very close tie between your product or idea and the story. Simply attaching a news hashtag to content that is completely unrelated is not a best practice, and will likely draw the ire of your followers.

—O—

Organic Reach

Describes the number of unique people who view your content without paid promotion. The distinction between organic and paid reach is, of course, that the former is free. People come across this content through the feeds, streams, posts, pages of their contacts—usually friends, family, colleagues, trusted brands, and cats/dogs.

ow.ly

Ow.ly is a URL shortener that converts a regular URL into a more condensed format. More specifically ow.ly is Hootsuite’s built in URL shortener that you can access via your Hootsuite dashboard or on the ow.ly site. This link shortener allows you to upload images, track real-time clicks that don’t include clicks from bots, post links to various social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+. You can also use the shortened URL in emails or on your website and use Hootsuite’s URL click stats to track how many clicks those links receive.

—P—

Paid Reach

Similar to organic reach, this refers to the number of individuals viewing your published paid content—ads, sponsored stories, promotional material. For example, paid Facebook ads are labeled as Sponsored content, while Twitter’s are identified as Promoted Tweets. Paid reach generally has a much larger network than organic reach so messages are potentially read by people outside of a specific contact list. You can also target specific messaging to groups based on commonalities like location and shared interests.

Paid social media

Paid social media refers to the use of social media for ad placement. The most common types of paid social media are native advertisements such as Facebook Ads, Twitter Promoted Tweets, LinkedIn Sponsored Updates, and YouTube sponsored videos. Other forms of paid social media include traditional display ads on social networks and Twitter Promoted Accounts.

Permalink

The URL address of an individual piece of content. Permalinks are useful because they allow you to reference a specific Tweet, update, or blog post instead of the feed or timeline in which you found it. You can quickly find an item’s permalink by clicking on its timestamp.

Pinned Tweet

A Tweet that has been pinned to the top a Twitter profile page. Pinning a Tweet is a great way to feature an important announcement or one of your greatest hits. Everyone who views your profile page will see the Tweet; however, pinning a Tweet will not have an effect on its visibility in anyone else’s timeline. To increase your reach and impressions, consider Promoted Tweets.

Pins

Favourite links stored on Pinterest are called Pins. Each Pin is made up of a picture and a description given by the user; when clicked, Pins direct users to the image source page. Pins can be liked or repinned by other users. Users can also organize Pins by theme or event into visual collections called Pinboards.

Pinterest

Pinterest is a visual organizer for saving and sharing links to webpages and other media that you like—otherwise known as Pins. Pins are represented by a picture and a description of your choosing. They can be organized into collections called Pinboards. Pinterest users can share their Pins with others, or Repin pictures they liked from other users. Think of Pinterest as a virtual scrapbook, or a bookmarks page with pictures. Common uses include event planning, food blogging, and fashion blogging. You can also use Pinterest for business. Learn from these brands how to do it well.

Pinboard

A collection of Pins on Pinterest. A Pinboard can be organized by any theme of your choosing, and it can either be private or public. Some examples of Pinboards: 50 Alternative Uses for Mason Jars, Short Hairstyles, My Dream Wedding, Easy Appetizers. As you can see, it’s easy to get creative with ways to use Pinterest.

Post

A Facebook status update, or an item on a blog or forum.

Promoted Accounts

Announced in 2010, Promoted Accounts are a Twitter Ads feature that invites targeted users to follow a Twitter Handle. This function is used to quickly grow a Twitter handle’s following. Promoted accounts appear in the Home timeline, the Discover tab and profile pages.

Promoted Trends

Promoted Trends are a Twitter Ads feature that allows an advertiser to promote time-, context- and event-sensitive trends to the top of the Trends list on Twitter. They are clearly marked as “Promoted.”

Promoted Tweets

Promoted Tweets are native advertisements targeted to a specific audience available through Twitter Ads. They look almost identical to organic Tweets in users’ timelines but include a small “Promoted” marker. Promoted Tweets are used by advertisers to reach an expanded audience.

Protected account

A private Twitter account. Only approved followers can view Tweets and photos from a protected account or access its complete profile. Tweets from protected accounts cannot be retweeted, even by approved followers.

Publishing approval process

A business procedure for ensuring that outbound social media messages are error-free, on-time, and on-brand. Many organizations now protect their social media accounts by managing them through a social relationship platform (SRP), which provide a safe environment for teams to collaborate on content before publishing. Messages are typically drafted by lower level employees, interns, or contractors before receiving approvals from managers, supervisors, and/or compliance officers.

—Q—

—R—

Reach

Reach is a data metric that determines the potential size of audience any given message could reach. It does not mean that that entire audience will see your social media post, but rather tells you the maximum amount of people your post could potentially reach. Reach is determined by a fairly complex calculation, that includes # of followers, shares and impressions as well as net follower increase over time. Reach should not be confused with Impressions or Engagement.

Reddit

reddit is a popular website and social networking site on which content submitted or shared by users is then voted on by other visitors. Each piece of content, from videos to text posts, can be either upvoted (positive) or downvoted (negative) by users. The most upvoted and commented on posts appear higher up on the website’s main page, as well as on its many topic-focused sections called subreddits.

Retargeting

Retargeting is an online advertising technique that involves targeting web visitors who expressed an interest in your products or services. This is accomplished by placing a small tracking tag on your website. Once visitors come to your website, you can then target them as they visit other websites including Facebook, news sites, blogs, or other online media. The rationale is that these visitors are your best chance to make a sale so instead of advertising to strangers, you spend your budget on prospects who have already visited your website. Other advanced uses include targeting custom audience segments (using data you’ve collected from other sources such as a CRM system or Facebook), offering shoppers who abandoned your check-out a special deal to come back, and building lists of valuable prospects to target (such as visitors who viewed 25+ blog posts and visited specific product pages).

Repin

On Pinterest, if you find a Pin on another user’s Pinboard that you like, you can save it to your board by Repinning it. To do that, hover your cursor over the image, and select ‘Repin.’ Then, you can either add the pin to an existing Pinboard collection, or start a new one. You have the option of using the existing description for the Pin, or come up with your own. If you like the Pin, but don’t want it to appear on your Pinterest page, you can Like it instead of Repinning it.

Reply

A response to someone’s Tweet that begins with their @username. Unlike Direct Messages, replies are public. When you click the reply button next to a Tweet, your ensuing conversation will be viewable in the public area of your profile.

Note: on Twitter, any Tweet that begins with a @username will be treated as a reply, whether you’re responding to a specific Tweet or not. Therefore, opening a Tweet with someone’s username is a surefire way to limit the visibility of the message. It will not appear in your followers’ timelines unless they also follow the Twitter handle that you’re addressing. If you want to start your Tweet with someone’s @username, add another character before the @ symbol (like “.”) so that Twitter treats the message as a mention, not a reply.

Response rate

A engagement metric to assess how much you are interacting with your social audience. To calculate your response rate, take the number of mentions that you have replied to in a given time period and divide it by the total number of mentions you have received (excluding retweets). You can also try out our helpful tool, Grade Your Social, to find out what your response rate is on Twitter.

Response volume

The total number of outbound messages that an organization, team, or specific social media account delivers in response to customer service issues within a given time period.

Return on investment (ROI)

Return on relationship (ROR)

A measurement of the value gained by a person or business from developing a relationship. Measuring ROR isn’t easy; it involves not only analyzing connection growth, but also understanding the impact your customers’ voices have on your brand and reputation. This includes sentiment analysis, as well as engagement metrics for your content, like organic sharing rates. ROR is an alternative (or complementary) metric to social media ROI.

Retweet

A Tweet that is re-shared to the followers of another user’s Twitter account. There are two kinds of Retweet: the classic “manual” Retweet and the now-standard “web Retweet”. In a manual Retweet, you simply type “RT” before the @username and content of somebody else’s Tweet. This used to be the only way you could retweet, and it’s the still only way to add your own comment to a Tweet when you pass it along. A “web Retweet” is what happens when you click the official Retweet button: the full Tweet appears in your timeline in its original form, complete with the author’s name and avatar. Since a web Retweet allows your followers to easily retweet or favorite the original Tweet, it’s generally considered good etiquette to use this method unless you have something valuable to add through a manual RT.

RSS

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a format for syndicating web content. Bloggers, news publishers, and other content creators use RSS feeds to effectively broadcast content (or content summaries) to audiences. Readers can subscribe to RSS feeds without providing personal information, and then automatically receive updates through a news reader or aggregator.

RT

—S—

Scale

The degree to which an organization can effectively use social media across multiple departments and geographies. “Scaling up social media” is an effort to coordinate social listening, engagement, and analytics among multiple groups while eliminating redundancy, confusion, and waste.

Scheduling

Planning social media updates and content ahead of time, using a social relationship platform (SRP) or another publishing tool. Scheduling allows social media practitioners to save time in their daily workflow by drafting several messages at once, often as part of a publishing approval process. It also enables them to reach audiences in different time zones and organize extended marketing campaigns.

Sentiment analysis

An attempt to understand how an audience feels about a brand, company, or product based on data collected from social media. It typically involves the use of natural language processing or another computational method to identify the attitude contained in a social media message. Different analytics platforms classify sentiment in a variety of ways; for example, some use “polar” classification (positive or negative sentiment), while others sort messages by emotion or tone (Contentment/Gratitude, Fear/Uneasiness, etc).

SEO

Search engine optimization is the practice of increasing the “organic” visibility of a web page in a search engine, such as Google. Although businesses can pay to promote their websites on search engine results pages (Search Engine Marketing, or SEM), SEO refers to “free” tactics that enhance the search ranking of a page.

Share of Voice

Share of voice is a metric for understanding how many social media mentions a particular brand is receiving in relation to its competition. Usually measured as a percentage of total mentions within an industry or among a defined group of competitors.

Short link

SlideShare

A popular social platform for sharing presentations and other business-oriented content. SlideShare makes it easy to embed content on websites and share it to other social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, which has owned the platform since 2012.

SMS

SMS is the text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems. For marketing purposes, it is often used by brands to promote text-based offers to consumers, remind about bills (common for telecommunication companies), or send location-based notifications (such as a promo code when a consumer walks by a restaurant).

Social customer service

The practice of identifying and resolving customer service issues on social media. Social customer service should be coordinated internally across departments so that an organization can respond rapidly to any customer inquiry on any channel. The most effective social customer service is proactive: in addition to fielding inbound messages, the organization monitors social media for keywords that could indicate customer service issues. The organization then reaches out to resolve potential issues before they escalate, creating greater customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Social media management

Technology and business processes for securely managing social media accounts, engaging audiences, and measuring the business results of social media activities. Effective social media management is absolutely vital to conducting business on social media. It enables an organization to keep track of all of its social media accounts and provide various teams and individuals with the appropriate levels of access to these assets. When implemented at scale across departments and regions, coordinated social media management practices allow everyone within the organization to collaborate and achieve measurable outcomes on social media.

Social media marketing

The use of social media by marketers to increase brand awareness, identify key audiences, generate leads, and build meaningful relationships with customers. Social media marketing should be well coordinated with social customer service, community management, and social selling activities to create seamless relationships with customers across their life cycle. Of course, social media is just one channel in the overall marketing mix; the most effective social media marketing programs are also integrated into multi-channel strategies.

Social media monitoring

Listening and responding to brand and keyword mentions on social media. Social media monitoring is crucial to social customer service, social selling, social media marketing, and community management.

Social media ROI

A measurement of the effectiveness of an organization’s investment in social media. Like any metric for “return on investment”, social media ROI is calculated by dividing the total benefits of an investment by the sum of its costs. Therefore, it is completely dependent on which costs and benefits are factored into the calculation. To get meaningful value from an ROI calculation, the metric should be fully aligned with the business objectives behind a social media activity. Social media should also be properly integrated with web analytics in order to assess its value within a multi-channel attribution model.

Social Relationship Platform (SRP)

Social relationship platforms are secure and scalable technologies that allow businesses to manage social media communications of any kind across departments and devices. That’s a mouthful, but, put simply, these tools put everything you need for social media into one place, making it easier to manage. Social relationship platforms are used for monitoring, posting and tracking social media, and help manage everything from customer service to lead generation. Hootsuite is a social relationship platform.

Social selling

The use of social media by sales professionals to increase productivity and generate revenue. Sellers can effectively leverage social media to enhance their reputations, expand their interpersonal networks, and attract new prospects. They can also identify buyers by listening and engaging in the online spaces where potentials customers are conducting research and asking for advice.

SoLoMo

SoLoMo is the combination of three of biggest trends among consumers: using social media (So); location-based relevance in both search intent and the use of the internet to find local products and services (Lo); and mobile adoption in which consumers tend to prefer to access apps and the internet through smartphones rather than desktops or tablets (Mo). The best way to understand it is to envision the following dialogue:

Venture Capitalist: Why should we give 50 million dollars in funding to your startup with no customers and not a line of code written?

Guy in Hoodie: “SoLoMo!”

Spam

Unnecessary and repetitive social media content that clogs up the feeds of social media users. In other words, the bane of your existence. The term has been used to refer to junk messages since the earliest days of the Internet. Its meaning originates from a 1970 Monty Python skit in which the word “spam” is spoken repeatedly to the point of ludicrousness. The skit culminates in a group of Vikings singing a timeless paean to everyone’s favorite canned meat product. Seriously, check it out.

Subreddit

A subreddit is a smaller forum within the social website reddit that is dedicated to a specific topic or theme. These are defined by the symbol “/r/” which precedes the unique reddit url of that particular subreddit. There are large subreddits like /r/politics or /r/videos, but they can be as specific as /r/learnuselesstalents ore /r/contagiouslaughter. There are thousands upon thousands of subreddits, and the reddit homepage is composed of the most popular content from every subreddit combined. You can also customize your own reddit homepage by subscribing to your favorite subreddits.

Subtweet

The stealthy art of disparaging someone in a Tweet without @mentioning their Twitter handle. You’re talking about them behind their back, but doing it publicly. A paradox, really.

—T—

Thread

A strand of messages which represent a conversation or part of a conversation. Threads are essential to most forms of online communication, including social media, web forums, and email. Without them, it is incredibly difficult to put messages into context or keep track of ongoing conversations. Anyone who used email before Gmail revolutionized the medium with threaded conversations can attest to that. Threads begin with an initial message and then continue as a series of replies or comments.

Throwback Thursday (#tbt)

A weekly social media tradition in which people make Instagram a little less instant. Although Throwback Thursday wasn’t invented on Instagram, the term has been widely popularized by the platform. Essentially, every Thursday users post either a really old photograph of themselves (as a child, in high school, etc) or a saved photo they took more recently but want to share because it’s just that good. The next time you go camping and take lots of amazing photos, hold off on spamming your followers with all of them at once. Just save them for later and #tbt every Thursday to your heart’s content.

Timestamp

The date and time that a message is posted to a social network, usually visible below the headline or username. Clicking on a timestamp will usually bring you to the content’s permalink.

Top Tweets

The most popular and engaging Tweets for a given search query, as determined by a Twitter algorithm. Searches on Twitter.com return Top Tweets by default, but you can toggle to “All” results to see the full list of Tweets that mach your search.

Trend

A topic or hashtag that is popular on social media at a given moment. Trends are highlighted by social networks such as Twitter and Facebook to encourage discussion and engagement among their users. The “trending” concept was first popularized by Twitter and has since been adopted by Facebook, Google+, and other networks. The trends that you see on Twitter and Facebook are personalized for you, based on your location as well as who you follow or what pages you like.

Trending

Trendjacking

When a brand or individual tries to benefit from a social media trend by injecting their own irrelevant content into the conversation. Attempts to take over the conversation with

Triage

The process of prioritizing, assigning, and responding to inbound social media messages. The term is borrowed from emergency medicine, where it is crucial to assess the relative urgency of various cases in order to prioritize care. In a social media triage process, incoming messages are filtered, assigned to the right people, evaluated for urgency, and possibly escalated so that the organization can provide the appropriate response (either online, offline, or both).

Tweet

A Twitter message. Tweets can contain up to 140 characters of text, as well as photos, videos, and other forms of media. They are public by default and will show up in Twitter timelines and searches unless they are sent from Protected Accounts or as Direct Messages. Tweets can also be embedded in webpages.

Twitter

A social network and media platform that enables users to publish 140-character messages along with photos, videos, and other content. Twitter is famous for its real-time and emergent discussions on breaking news stories and trends.

Twitter canoe

A Twitter conversation that has picked up too many usernames for an actual conversation to take place. The thread might begin as a dialogue between two people before spiraling out of control as more and more Twitter users insinuate themselves into the conversation with “Reply all” messages. Like an overloaded canoe, the thread sinks once too many people have hopped in.

Twitter Card

A media-rich Tweet that includes an embedded video, photo gallery, page summary, or other interactive element beyond the text of the message. Twitter Cards help your Tweets stand out and encourage your followers to engage with your content directly from their timelines. They are automatically attached to a Tweet whenever you (or any other user) tweets a link to a webpage that is marked up with some simple HTML code. To find out how to enable Twitter Cards, check out Twitter’s guide for developers.

—U—

Unfollow

The action of unsubscribing from another Twitter user’s account.

URL

The location of a page or other resource on the World Wide Web. The acronym stands for Uniform Resource Locator, but you will soon forget that.

URL shortener

A tool that condenses a URL into a shorter (and more social media friendly) format, known as a short link. Users who click on a short link are redirected to the original URL. URL shorteners can also provide link tracking capabilities, which allow businesses to measure click-throughs from social media and attribute website conversions to individual social messages. Popular URL shorteners include bit.ly and Hootsuite’s ow.ly.

User-generated content (UGC)

Media that has been created and published online by the users of a social or collaboration platform, typically for non-commercial purposes. User-generated content is one of the defining characteristics of social media. It is often produced collaboratively and in real-time by multiple users (for example, the Twitch plays Pokemon project). Many companies have enthusiastically embraced and encouraged user-generated content as a means of increasing brand awareness and customer loyalty. Instagram contests, Vine video contests, and other UGC-based social campaigns allow businesses to tap into the creative energies of their customers and use their contributions to fuel marketing strategies.

—V—

Vanity URL

A vanity URL is a web address that is branded for marketing purposes. They are a custom branded URL that replaces common URL shortener formats with something that has your branding or is related to the content. Instead of showing up as ow.ly or a bit.ly, it could show up looking like Time Inc.’s vanity URL “ti.me”.

—W—

Who to Follow

Who to Follow is a feature in the left hand sidebar of your Twitter homepage that helps users find relevant accounts to follow. The accounts that populate in the Who to Follow section are suggested because they have similar interests, professions or geographic proximity to you. You can click follow them immediately or view their profile for more information.

Word cloud

Word clouds, also known as tag clouds or weighted lists, are a visual representation of text, where the frequency of a word determines its size in the word cloud. This is a great tool for identifying words that are repeated or most common.

—X—

—Y—

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]]>http://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-managers-definitive-glossary-2014/feed/0Empower and Align the Social Organization with Hootsuite Enterprise and IBM Connectionshttp://blog.hootsuite.com/empower-and-align-the-social-organization-with-hootsuite-enterprise-and-ibm-connections/
http://blog.hootsuite.com/empower-and-align-the-social-organization-with-hootsuite-enterprise-and-ibm-connections/#commentsWed, 15 Oct 2014 13:00:47 +0000http://blog.hootsuite.com/?p=65909Large organizations understand it’s important to bring social media and internal enterprise communications together. However, effective social communication is still hindered in most workplaces by an artificial separation... Read More

]]>Large organizations understand it’s important to bring social media and internal enterprise communications together. However, effective social communication is still hindered in most workplaces by an artificial separation between personal social media and enterprise communications.

Build a Collaborative Enterprise

The Hootsuite application for IBM Connections allows organizations to become truly social in the way they do business. Social content, thought leadership, and customer voices can flow fluidly into the enterprise and across departmental silos, connecting individuals in every team with the ideas and people that matter. Business professionals can shift seamlessly between their IBM Connections communities and external social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, leveraging every channel to gather information, collaborate, and develop relationships.

The Hootsuite application for IBM Connections, available now in the Hootsuite App Directory, enables joint customers of IBM Connections and Hootsuite Enterprise to:

Work more effectively by engaging with IBM Connections communities in Hootsuite alongside social network streams for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more.

Save time by instantly sharing social content from Twitter and Facebook to colleagues and communities in IBM Connections.

Easily collaborate with your IBM Connections communities by posting and searching for content across all of your communities from within Hootsuite.

“We are very excited about the launch of the Hootsuite integration with IBM. With the general availability of the Hootsuite App for IBM Connections – whether in the cloud or on-premises – our joint customers now have the ability to engage with their IBM Connections streams from within the Hootsuite dashboard. This level of integration and efficiency is unique to our relationship and will allow companies to work more effectively by bringing internal and external social content, thought leadership, and customer voices into a single centralized dashboard — making it incredibly easy to collaborate and share intelligence within the enterprise and across departmental silos, connecting individuals in every team with the ideas and people that matter.” - Sandy Carter, General Manager of Ecosystem Development, IBM

Learn more about the Hootsuite Enterprise and IBM Connections integration

Empower Every Team

Now anyone in your organization can manage personal social networks and IBM Connections communities from a single centralized dashboard, making it incredibly easy to collaborate and share intelligence with the right people at the right time. No more cutting and pasting links into email accounts and reposting in IBM Connections communities one-by-one. This eliminates the need to open 20 browsers at once and gives people everything they need in one place. The new workflow allows you to simply click on the share link, select the community in which you want to post, and add a message to your fellow Community members.

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This is the first integration between IBM and Hootsuite Enterprise. As we expand our integration and technology, there will be more to come between IBM and Hootsuite.

The Hootsuite IBM Connections Application is only available for Hootsuite Enterprise and IBM Connections customers.

If you are interested in learning more and you’re an existing Hootsuite Enterprise customer, please contact your customer success manager.